Let's begin with the essentials. Mulligan Stew is utterly dazzling. Its pedigree goes back, not to the well-made novel, but rather to the "anatomy"—those extravaganzas that sprawl across world literature, offering encyclopedic, and usually comic, views of life and its foibles. Like Gargantua and Pantagruel or Tristram Shandy, Mulligan Stew sustains a display of linguistic virtuosity that takes your breath away. It contains some of the best parodies since S. J. Perelman at his most manic, and perhaps the most corrosive satire of the literary scene since early Aldous Huxley. This is a novel with all the stops pulled out, Gilbert Sorrentino's masterpiece….

A mulligan stew can contain anything—and Sorrentino has said that he wanted to be able to put anything into his book. He has. Part of its pleasure is in its variety: there are morsels for every literary taste. Essentially, the book parodies—with...